"Why do people read that stuff? Why do they go to those movies? Because you are just as sick as I am!" horror novelist Stephen King shouted last night to an audience of 500 at the Graduate School of Design.

The writer of Kujo, Carrie, Misery, Christine, Pet Cemetary and many other grisly tales of horror, told Harvard students and faculty how he develops ideas for his stories. King was invited to speak at Harvard on behalf by the Expository Writing Program.

The Piper Auditorium audience had the opportunity to hear the best-selling author say that when he reads horror stories, he looks at the back cover to see if the author looks depraved.

With casual dress and manner, King also read a newly-written short story, "The Rainy Season," a comic-horror tale of an unsuspecting professor and his wife who summer at a dingy summer town in Maine called "Willow."

After reading the story, which drew nervous laughter from a fascinated audience, King answered questions about the inspiration for his stories.

According to King, everyone fears death, and he taps this fear in his books. "Most of us know that when [death] happens it will not be very nice," he said.

Modern horror movies also play on the fears of the society that produces them, King said. "I don't think its any coincidence that the first of radioactive movies should come out of Japan," he said referring to Godzilla, a film whose monster was awakened by radioactive bomb tests.

Likewise, American horror movies like The Fly often include gruesome human mutations, King said. "It's not just a coincidence that this comes out at a time when American are conscious about cancer."

King said he got the idea for his book, The Dead Zone, in which a man is able to see the future, from thinking about what one would do if given the opportunity to kill Hitler before he rose to power.

"Good stories often start with subversive immoral ideas like, would assasination ever be moral? Is it ever right? Does there ever come a time where you say to people `pick up the gun. Do it.' I wrote the book to see what I think," King said.

"When I started teaching, I expected my students to have read A Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies," said Richard C. Marius, who heads Expository Writing. "Now everyone has read Stephen King. In understanding children and adults and evil and their confrontation with evil, Stephen King is in a class with Henry James and the Turn of the Screw. He is a lot better than Edgar Allen Poe."

King combined humor and cynicism throughout his speech. He concluded by saying, "I hope when you come home to the dark, you'll remember: Everything is not all right."